Thank you for giving me this opportunity to report back to you about stem cell research facilities in the United Kingdom.

Last October, together with Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Joan McDonald and University of Connecticut stem cell researcher Marc Lalande, I toured a variety of stem cell research facilities across the United Kingdom at the invitation of the UK government.

We were part of a delegation that included groups from states with innovative stem cell initiatives. 

The other groups in the delegation included researchers, policy makers and industry representatives from Maryland/Johns Hopkins University, Texas/Baylor University, and California and several of California’s leading research universities. 

The delegation was assembled by the UK government as a means to educate about the scope and nature of stem cell research in the UK and, in the process, bring to light potential research collaborations and investment opportunities.

Our tour began in Edinburgh.

We visited the University of Edinburgh and were given an overview of its stem cell research laboratories by Ian Wilmut. We met with a cross section of academic researchers, researchers transitioning into stem cell-related entrepreneurial activities, and Scottish stem cell research policy advocates.

As was the case throughout our visit, our meetings also included introductions to and talks by those charged with ethics oversight.

The University of Edinburgh and its commitment to stem cell research was impressive. As it now stands, Ian Wilmut’s Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine is a state-of-the-art facility. More important, though, is its planned expansion. 

We were given a good sense of its future components and interconnection to other facilities both at Edinburgh University and around the UK.

We next visited the University of New Castle. New Castle University, long a leader in invitro fertilization, has recently opened a new invitro fertilization facility. This facility is reported to have the highest rate of success in world—success as measured by births resulting from pregnancies resulting from invitro procedures conducted at the New Castle clinic. 

This success rate is due both to the equipment as well as the systems and protocols developed in New Castle.

Perhaps more impressive was the connection—literally and figuratively—of this fertility clinic to the university stem cell research laboratories. Both facilities—the invitro fertilization clinic and stem cell labs—were designed and built according to Good Manufacturing Practices. Donated embryos can be transferred seamlessly from the clinic to the laboratory. 

To the extent clinical opportunities arise from research conducted through these two GMP facilities, the process involved in getting stem cell research-derived material into human subjects is greatly simplified.

We spent considerable time when we were at the New Castle facilities and also subsequently exploring what it would take to duplicate the New Castle facilities here in Connecticut. 

The University of Connecticut’s existing and highly regarded invitro fertilization clinic and UConn’s planned stem cell research expansion seem like an ideal site to build upon what has been accomplished in New Castle.

We took special note that the New Castle invitro fertilization-stem cell research lab complex was a custom design. 

A means to mass produce it, so to speak, does not yet exist. This could be a real opportunity for a Connecticut provider/manufacturer to replicate New Castle’s design and equipment for installation at UConn Farmington and also around the world.

We have been working since our visit to the UK to obtain the specifics about what it would take to replicate New Castle’s clinic here—both the manufacturing details and a firm grasp of the costs involved.

The last portion of our trip was in London. There we heard presentations by University of London and Cambridge scientists about their stem cell research efforts and nascent entrepreneurial activity.

The ongoing research was fascinating. One project and start-up company concerns macular degeneration. We had an interesting exchange about one of CT’s new biotech start-ups, Optherion, based in New Haven. Just this summer Optherion raised $37 million, which Optherion has put to work towards its own macular degeneration R&D.

We hope our contacts in the UK will cause both research and commercial collaboration between CT and the UK in the critical field of macular degeneration treatment.

The presentations in London were perhaps the most focused on commercial development.

While I was impressed by the desire and effort to forge commercial applications of UK stem cell research, I was also somewhat surprised that the business model for the UK entrepreneurial activities appears to be based on mining profit—and recouping R&D expenditures—from the US market, while pricing products below true cost in the UK and Europe.  

I am not confident that such a strategy will work for the UK—that US venture capitalists will pour investment into companies and manufacturing sites based in countries that will not allow them to price their products according to the market. 

At the same time, however, this certainly raises an opportunity for us to recruit these companies when they are in later stage  clinical development and, especially, when they are at the manufacturing stage.